You're not really a good samaritan when you're using emergency frequencies without authorization. Sounds like he deserves the punishment.

I let my membership expire after they unilaterally cancelled my paper QST. I'm still mad about that, and the steady trickle of other news doesn't make me want to go back.

Hopefully someone or some other business will buy them. Hate to see them go.

Maybe he'd do better if he used the 2.4GHz band 🤔

Seems like it's not too hard to make. Maybe I need at get on APRS....

Maybe we should start a contesting community 🤔

I'll make a video at some point, but it's just an Oscilloquartz 8663-xs that I mounted in the box with connections for power and 10MHz. I got the OCXO unit from eBay.

Making a digital mode faster means making it less resilient at a low SNR. Shannon had something to say about that. Seems like the question should be how to make it faster or how to make it better at low SNR.

I've heard tuning cavity filters is an experience - touchy and time consuming.

I make videos of my SOTA activations, but I still write trip reports for the summits for people who like to read.

Do you have one in mind? I'd be suspicious of a 1/4 wave vertical with no radials, but the ones you're thinking of could be some other kind of antenna.

I'm excited to see the new digital modes people bring to ham radio, or invent.

I got around 1550km on 6m in the contest (CM88 to DM79, San Francisco to Denver), sideband and cw contacts. I was only running 10w to a dipole.

People in northern California with better stations were hearing even farther east!

A j-pole is a half-wavelength vertical with a quarter-wavelength matching section on the bottom.

It turns out that the 70cm band is about 3x the frequency of the 2m band (150MHz * 3 = 450MHz, close enough to each band). So the 2m the long leg of the j-pole is 3/4 wavelength (1/2 + 1/4 matching section), and on 70cm the long leg is 2.25 wavelength (3/2 + 3/4 matching). Both are an odd number of quarter waves, as we expect. The ham who made that briefing probably discovered in their testing that the matching stub wasn't good for both bands, so they added a second one for 70cm.

This is not a novel design, Arrow Antennas has been selling one like it for years (https://www.arrowantennas.com/osj/j-pole.html)

The EFHW is my go-to antenna for portable operation.

I've tried doing digital with a raspberry pi and using VNC viewer on my phone to control it. It's worked at home, but I've had issues with the sound card and CAT interface on summits. Still don't have it working well.

For logging, I like pen and paper, since I can't type fast enough on my phone. I wrote a little python logger (on GitHub somewhere) to make it easier to get logs in the formats needed for SOTA/POTA/contests.

Communications have been important since people started making armies. Plenty of battles and wars would have gone differently if messages could have been passed faster. Wireless has only gotten more critical since WWI.

I suppose this war has just shown the importance of radio and brought it to people's attention. There's an interesting podcast, From the Crow's Nest, that talks about radio (and electromagnetic stuff in general) in the modern military.

Big SOTA fan here!

It seems like there have been more blackouts on HF since the sunspots started coming back.

Next time I'll add that. Or, copy the link instead of typing it 😂